My Open Source Journey

Fedora 23 Release Party

For the first time in Albania we organized a release party where we gathered people who were interested in Fedora. Fedora 23 release party successfully took place at Saturday, the 14th of November in the “Open Labs Hackerspace” in Tirana, Albania. I must say that it was a full house! Actually we started building the Albanian Fedora community recently which is why we didn’t know how many people could come and honestly didn’t expect many, the number of attendants surpassed our expectations. There were many Fedora users, contributors and people that were new in Fedora (thank you!).

The event began at 4 pm. First of all as we had new people, Kristi made an introduction of Open Labs ,the Albanian based not for profit community that promotes open knowledge initiatives such as Wikipedia, Linux, LibreOffice, Mozilla and any free libre open source platform that promotes the free software manifesto, and how people can be part of each of them.

Silva made an introduction of Fedora: what is, some details about this operating system, how we can download and install it in our computer/laptop. Also she explained the different flavors of Fedora, spins, and the secondary architectures such as Pidora.

Ina, another new Fedora contributor, explained to the participants what is Fedora Project and its four foundations. Also she told how we can contribute at Fedora Project to be part of our big community.

I explained the new features of the new version of Fedora for workstation aimed at home users, hobbyists, students, and software developers. Fedora 23 Workstation is the first release of Fedora to include LibreOffice 5 so Bela talked about the new version of LibreOffice and the Albanian Community of LibreOffice. Also i showed how we can upgrade from Fedora 22 to Fedora 23 using the DNF system upgrade plugin that is simple and easy.

At 6 PM we had a skype call with Giannis and some other members of Fedora community in Greece who told us more about their experiences in Fedora community and to whom we introduced our own community. We took advantage of this call to learn some new ways or strategies on increasing the number of Fedora users and contributors, and also talk about future collaboration between the two communities.

Hosting release parties near the time of a Fedora release is a great way to help spread Fedora and provide an opportunity for Fedora users to come together as a community and you can find information on the new release, demos, speeches and, at last but not least, friends ready to answer all your questions. Unfortunately, swags had not arrived yet, but we still had other swag that Giannis and the community of Greece gave us so all the participants took stickers, DVD, pins… In the end we had pizza and drinks for everybody. Of course, I would like to thank the Fedora Project for sponsoring the party, and everyone that joined me to celebrate a great Fedora release.

If you are interested in contributing in Fedora, Open Labs Hackerspace and Albanian Fedora Community it’s the right place to meet contributors and have the possibility to ask them about their experience, and receive help to join our marvelous community! See you soon in next Fedora events!